


Sinople

by Scappodaqui



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Colorblindness, Fluff, Foreshadowing, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Light Angst, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, Pining, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Summer, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 03:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4332921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Sinople--a color in heraldry used to describe both red and green.</i><br/>In which Steve has deuteranopia and asks Bucky to describe what different colors feel like. They go on a summer vacation to Bucky's family's house in Montauk. A stealth crossover with <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. Blink and you'll miss it.</p><p> </p><p>"He was the kind of guy who’d argue with you about whether the grass was green.  </p><p>He really would...."</p><p> <br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Sinople

He was the kind of guy who’d argue with you about whether the grass was green. 

He really would.

When he was ten he got into a fight with some kid about what color the Giants logo was. Green, like grass, he insisted. Orange, said the kid, his name was Rugie maybe, this little Italian who called Steve _desta di minchia_ , and pazz _ino_ , called him nuts.

You could say Steve saw red but he actually didn’t see red. So, he just got _mad_. Not mad that the kid was arguing with him but mad that he wouldn’t listen. He got mad, got into a fight, and bruised in colors he couldn't name by the time Bucky came to finish it.

You could say he was wrong, but who was to say seeing things the way he saw them was wrong? It was what _he_ saw. “It isn’t black and white,” he said, frustrated, “I see colors, it’s not like I’m in a movie, I just can’t tell the difference between some things. It doesn’t matter. It’s not _important_.” Mostly he could figure it out well enough on his own, thank you very much. When he went to the butcher for his ma he sometimes couldn’t tell good cuts of meat from bad, red from brown, but he could smell them and argue after the fact and anyhow they barely ever bought meat, so who cared. 

But with Bucky. He’d ask sometimes, okay. What does green look like to you. What’s the difference. I want to know. Just out of curiosity. He trusted Bucky--that was it--to tell him what he really saw. Not by way of comparison to other colors or to avoid bad meat or arguments about the New York Giants, but what he actually felt when he looked at the colors. 

Green. “The smell of a baseball field,” Bucky said. “When your feet scrub it up running. It’s like wet vegetables, it’s like your snot in the _winter_ , pickles, it’s _salty_ sometimes. Scum off the ocean, I mean I guess that’s blue but it’s _green_ , that’s what it is all right. There’s a little blue in green. Yellow.” Steve could pick out yellow.

“I can see blue,” Steve said. “The Dodgers. The sky.” He looked at Bucky, then away. “I thought I knew what was green, I know the grass is green. I guess we all just see parts of things. I guess we never see the same things. Maybe it’s everybody, but it’s more me.”

“But that’s what’s interesting,” Bucky said. “I like that. Anyway, you draw. You see even better, to do that, I just see colors, you see _everything_.”

“Well, Picasso,” Steve said, brightening. “Picasso painted in blue for awhile.” 

“There you go,” Bucky said, relieved. “And he’s really _good_ , right?”

“Yeah, he’s good. He paints things the way he sees them.”

August of ‘29, Bucky was twelve ( _and a half_ , almost). Steve was eleven and one month. It turned out to be the last year before Bucky’s cousins the Buchanans had to sell their house out in Montauk, but they didn’t know that then. They let Bucky and his parents stay there for a week while they weren’t using it. They even had a car up there for them, an old coupe. The train they took out from Penn Station was the Sunrise Special Monday, and it ran through a foggy corona of sky lit white pink yellow _blue_. It was Blue Monday, it was Pink Monday, it was Golden Monday. They didn’t know Black Tuesday was coming.

On the train they both stared out the window. At the sun hovering in the brilliant blue like a coin someone had tossed up that had never landed. Making its slow bright lucky arc across the sky.

The Sunrise Special took them out to Long Island to stay at the beach. Steve’s mother had to work. She stayed behind. She Had Her Pride, which was a thing his parents told him about Mrs. Rogers. Pride was the thing he had learned poor people had instead of money and it wasn’t something better-off people actually, in his experience, respected. It was more that they treated it with relief. Well she has her pride, she won’t bother us. It bothered Bucky. At least Steve could come along. He was good in the summers. He didn’t get sick as much. In March around Bucky’s birthday he had been really sick again, but he got better, and Bucky had made his parents promise to take him out to Montauk, and so they did.

They visited the lighthouse in Montauk. Montauk was very neat and very hot and green and blue. The lighthouse was banded in thick brick red and white. There were names of the people who had been shipwrecked etched in stone outside the lighthouse, on the bluff overlooking the ocean. Their names, the year, and next to some of them the tiny mark of their ages. 23. 45. 18.

“Come on,” Bucky said, watching the gulls, watching Steve reading names, “Let’s go; I want to swim.” 

“In a minute,” Steve said, pulling out his sketchbook. A seagull had just landed on the monument. He started drawing the bird’s angry, wild stare.

At the beach the waves brought a strange clear jelly to the shore, little transparent bubbles that dissolved but left pale beadlike blobs behind. They swam out as far as they could, well as far as Steve could, floated, and sputtered. They sucked seawater until they tasted it deep in the backs of their throats. Came back to the shore salt-drunk. Steve’s face a little bit green. He bent to catch his breath and dug up pebbles wet from the sand, slick and shining, his hair shining too, in the light. Gold-brown and sticking to the nape of his neck. The pebbles: gray, blue-green, rose-pink, brown. Bucky paid extra attention to colors around Steve but also recognized it was something they didn’t both see, so that was odd. Anyway, the pebbles.

“The pirate Jolly Rogers finds his treasure,” Bucky announced.

“Gemstones from Atlantis,” Steve said, slipping them around in his fingers and then handing them off to Bucky, who put them in his pocket to keep. “And, okay, who’re you?”

“I’ll be Captain Nemo. I guess.” Lately some of the shine had gone off of pretending. Different roles he’d used to play fit him as badly as clothing from six months ago.

The rocks in his pocket weighed there heavy while they charged the waves, splashing, looking for the distant tentacles of a giant squid, and he thought of all the shipwrecks, too. The things out there lost under cold water. The perils of the deep, the darkness underneath the blue. Imaginary perils were always better than the real ones. The tentacles of the giant squid you weren’t actually going to see. 

They ate watermelon outside on the porch after dinner while Bucky’s ma and dad and baby sisters listened to the radio inside. Music filtered out to them, an enticement, but the broad vault of the sky enticed them more, so they sat out looking at it with their wedges of melon on napkins in their laps. “You boys must be exhausted,” Bucky’s ma said, and Steve said, “No ma’am, we have pep in our step,” even though he had a patchy sunburn all over his back and the skin on his nose was peeling. Bucky’s ma laughed. Bucky shrugged. Steve did what he wanted.

When she was gone: “What color is watermelon,” Steve asked.

“Wet pale red,” Bucky said, staring at it. His eyes felt grainy from a long time looking at sun on water, into the fixed distance, and he had trouble shifting his gaze from the bright fruit, to Steve, and back. “Like the inside of your lip,” he said. “Little whitish in the red, like it’s, you know, your teeth. Teeth in it. Looking at it’s like that like it almost kind of hurts your teeth it’s so pink like you feel it in your skin, it’s like...” 

“Like what.”

“Lemme think,” Bucky muttered. “It’s... it’s warm and cold at the same time,” he said.

“You can see through it a little,” Steve said, squinting. “The light. It’s trans _luc_ ent.”

“That’s what it’s like,” Bucky said. “It’s like when you can see the sun through your eyelids when you lie down on the beach.”

“I get it.” Steve turned his slice of watermelon around in his fingers, examining it. Juice ran down the sides, dripping over his arms. “It get it, I can almost see it, how you can almost see patterns inside your head even with your eyes closed.”

“Eat it, already,” said Bucky. “It’s good.”

“I’m _looking_.”

Steve looked. Bucky watched him looking. He wasn’t going to see the color anyhow. He was pretending. Bucky bit deep into his watermelon slice and sucked away the pulp. He spit seeds in his hand. Black, shiny, hard. For some reason he tucked them into his palm and held them in a tight fist, the sugary wet of watermelon juice and spit sealing them in there, and then he threw the handful at Steve.

“Stoppit!” Steve said, flicking a seed back at him with remarkable accuracy.

“Okay, okay,” Bucky said, flinching, holding up his hands while Steve picked the seeds off the bare skin of his stomach and threw them at him, one by one. They left tiny shining spots on his skin and they stuck to Bucky where they landed.

“Boys,” his ma called from inside the half-open door. 

 

Bucky had almost forgotten about the rocks in his pockets. That night he just left his pants crumpled up and hanging from one of the cots they set up in the living room for him and Steve to sleep in. “Roughing it,” said his dad. “No, roughing it would be sleeping on the beach,” Bucky said, “with a campfire, like in Scouts,” and his dad said, “maybe tomorrow,” meaning no.

Maybe they had been out in the sun too much because he couldn’t sleep that night and felt very hot and uncomfortable. Steve was asleep, his breathing crackly, passed out, the crookedness of his back under a thin sheet and one elbow sticking up. Bucky kept thinking about the rocks, he wanted to see them again. Maybe one of them was a gemstone. 

But they looked different when he pulled them out of his pockets. They had dried off. He lay back in bed and held them up in the dark and squinted. Chafed one rock between his fingers. It felt rougher now, not wet from seawater. All of them looked dull, gray. He felt something like panic in his guts.

_Hey Steve_ , he thought, wanting to wake him up, _Steve, what color is this?_ But he didn’t. It made no sense. Plus he shouldn’t wake him up. He got scared though, looking at how small he was asleep and how his breathing sounded. Scared and hot and cold at the same time. Bucky tried to sleep, and slept, and he dreamed of the wet and slippery sea and the feel of hard watermelon seeds in his fingers and woke up with his groin pressed into the mattress.

They weren’t gemstones or rocks from Atlantis. Even in daylight they were still gray. It was all dumb. That day he threw the rocks back into the sea as far as he could, which was pretty far.

**Author's Note:**

> [deuteranopia ](http://www.color-blindness.com/deuteranopia-red-green-color-blindness/)   
>  [Sinople in heraldry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vert)   
>  [Montauk Lighthouse](http://longislandgenealogy.com/lighthouse.html)   
>  [1929 Montauk Beach poster](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/6e/1c/63/6e1c637a4c0888acb854c5df868dc046.jpg)


End file.
